Channel Shore Read online

  Listening Ears

  After the war Tucker was appointed Director of Acoustical Research at RAF Biggin Hill, where he worked on designing and building concave concrete walls fitted with microphones to detect enemy aircraft approaching over the Channel. These grew from a modest twenty feet in width to the monster 200-feet wall at Greatstone, which was backed up by two circular dishes supported on concrete standings. The Greatstone Listening Ear was in position by 1929. It worked, up to a point, but the operatives experienced difficulty in distinguishing between the sound waves created by aircraft and those of ships, or indeed road traffic.

  While Tucker wrestled with these problems, investigations of a different kind were being carried out at the Radio Research Station at Ditton Park near Slough. These culminated in 1935 in a memorandum to the government from the station’s director, Robert Watson-Watt, entitled ‘Detection and Location of Enemy Aircraft by Radio Methods’. Radar was born, and at a stroke Doctor Tucker’s sound mirrors were redundant. His plea for the two systems to be combined, with a chain of massive mirrors at sixteen-mile intervals from Norfolk to Dorset, was dismissed. The order was given for the existing sound mirrors to be destroyed, but through bureaucratic inertia they survived. Several still stand, mute and massive, their concrete stained and crumbling, like monuments built by some ancient civilisation for purposes lost in time.

  It is a strange place, Dungeness, not like anywhere else. It is triangular, shaped rather like the blade of a turfing spade, with its sharp end thrust out into the Channel. Its position means that it acts as a trap for the shingle shifted east along the shore by the prevailing wind-driven movement of water. The result is that the nose of the Ness, built up by the recruitment of shingle, is inclined to push ever further out. The south side of the triangle, immediately in front of the nuclear power stations, Dungeness B and the now-redundant Dungeness A, is exposed to the full force of the longshore drift and, if left to its own devices, rapidly erodes. For a long time it has been necessary to transfer enormous quantities of shingle from the eastern to the southern shore to save the power stations from being devoured by the sea.

  The water is deep off the beach and the tidal currents are swift. Big ships can come in close, but the low profile of the land can spell trouble when visibility is poor. There has been a succession of lighthouses, five in all. The most recent, black and white like a tubular liquorice sweet, was installed in 1961. In clear weather its light is visible twenty-five miles away.

  Before and despite the lighthouses, Dungeness was a byword for danger among mariners. The most outrageous of the many disasters overtook a passenger ship, the Northfleet, on the night of 22 January 1873. With 400 passengers and crew bound for Hobart, Tasmania, she was at anchor two miles off the Ness when she was struck amidships on the starboard side by a steamship going at full speed. She immediately began to list and the watch frantically hailed the vessel that had rammed her, appealing for help. The steamer, subsequently identified as the Murillo, a Spanish cargo ship, backed off and sailed away into the darkness.

  The Northfleet sank within an hour; only two of the seven lifeboats were successfully launched. Forty-three out of the 44 children on board, and 41 of the 42 women, were drowned. Altogether 291 people – most of them emigrants seeking a new life on the far side of the world – lost their lives. There was a huge fuss in Parliament, but the owners of the Murillo denied responsibility and in the absence of an extradition treaty between Britain and Spain there was little to be done. Eight months after the disaster, the Murillo was arrested off Dover, impounded and subsequently sold for £7500, the proceeds going to offset some of the insurance claims.

  For many centuries this great, bare expanse of shingle ridges, scoured and scourged by the winds, was cut off from the outside world, inhabited by a few families of inbreds who lived in huts and scraped an existence from fishing and the detritus washed up on their shore. The arrival of two outside fishing clans – one from Cornwall, the other French in origin – began to change the Ness. The fishing, mainly for herring, became more organised. Permanent dwellings were built, low against the shingle, thick-walled to withstand the storms. In time the railway arrived, and with it employees of the Southeastern Railway Company. Some of them liked the wildness and remoteness of the place and acquired surplus train carriages and dragged them across the stones to a spot they fancied, and either lived there or came for holidays.

  This democratic and spontaneous settlement pattern established the character of the Ness that endures, with inevitable modifications, today. The guiding principle is randomness. The hundred or so dwellings are scattered about as if they were toy houses thrown by a childish hand. There is no common architectural style. There are just cabins, shacks, chalets, call them what you will. A few of the original railway carriages survive, generally incorporated into expanded residences. Black is the predominant colour and rectangular box the predominant shape. But Dungeness allows for white and splashes of colour, expanses of untreated wood, curves and sharp angles, and the odd old-fashioned caravan.

  Everything is open. There are no drives or fences or hedges or enclosing walls. The gardens – most famously the garden created by the film director and designer, Derek Jarman – have no secrets. Paradoxically – given the absence of visible boundaries between properties – freedom of movement for visitors is severely restricted. The place is peppered with signs declaring that this track or that, or this patch of shingle or that, is private, and warning of the risk to life and limb posed by winches and cables put on the beach to get boats in and out of the sea.

  This fixation with privacy is combined, somewhat awkwardly, with the need to pull in as many visitors as possible to keep the local economy afloat. The lighthouses, the power stations, the terminus of the Romney and Hythe Steam Railway, the bird and plant life, the views and the general weirdness of the place make Dungeness a potent visitor attraction. Most of the cabins are second homes and/or holiday lets. Where once upon a time railway waggons changed hands for a tenner, the going price for a property in Dungeness these days is anything from £250,000 upwards.

  The legacy of the fishing heritage is very visible along the shore. Rusted winches rise from the shingle. Drums of cable lie on their sides, frozen by rust, leaking red onto the stones. The shells and skeletons of old boats are framed against the sky. A tiny handful of working boats survive. I was cycling cautiously around trying to find someone prepared to talk to me about the place when I was hailed from a window by one of the skippers (I think he was also the chairman of the residents’ association, although we did not get as far as exchanging names).

  ‘Do you want something?’

  ‘I’m writing a book about the Channel.’ I tried to explain what it was supposed to be about, then asked him if he lived permanently at Dungeness.

  ‘All my life.’

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘I’m a fisherman.’

  ‘Are you still fishing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Commercially?’

  (Pitying look) ‘We’re all commercial.’

  ‘Have you been fishing recently?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Four boxes of sole.’

  ‘Dover sole?’

  (More intense pitying look) ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where do they go?’

  ‘France.’

  The window shut, which I took to be a sign that the interview was over.

  The ride from Dungeness to the nearest inland settlement, Lydd, is not scenic. The flat road cuts through Denge Beach, which is not a beach at all but a windswept wasteland of stones and scrub, and Denge Marsh, which stopped being a real marsh centuries ago.

  Painters and writers used to rhapsodise about the magic of Romney Marsh and its coast. Paul Nash, who lived and painted at Dymchurch for a while, wrote of watching ‘the eastern sky darken against the dyked flats . . . the strange unity of sea, sky and earth that grows unnoticed at this time and place.�
� Ford Madox Ford, who lived near Winchelsea for much of the decade between 1901 and 1910, urged those coming to the Marsh to leave maps behind, or risk losing the ‘sense of magic’. Ford loved the ‘brooding silence, an inconceivably self-centred abstraction’, but even he found the south-east corner between Lydd and Dungeness ‘the Marsh at its most desolate . . . almost soilless, nearly always parched and brown.’

  I pedalled strenuously into an unremitting headwind past low banks and drifts of open shingle fringed by patches of scrub grass, gravel pits gouged and then left without any thought of landscaping and pallid fields grazed by a few sheep and horses in a manner suggesting they had been forgotten or abandoned until their natural terms expired. To the left, lines of pylons extended north from the power stations like skeletal robots on a secret and sinister mission. To the east an opposing army of wind turbines rotated their pale limbs in a slow, monotonous ballet.

  The road back to the sea skirts the perimeter of Lydd Ranges, which occupy a wedge of foreland between Dungeness and Camber. Mile after mile of chain-link fencing surmounted by razor wire and frequent warnings to keep out, backed up by red flags, made for dreary cycling. I reflected that wherever the magic of Romney Marsh had once resided, and whatever its elements were, it had been thoroughly erased before I got there.

  Magic of a different kind, uncelebrated in literature, is found by some at Camber Sands. On fine summer days, so I was told, the roads and car parks are clogged, and as many as 30,000 people disport themselves across a vast expanse of sand and frolic in the opaque, safe sea.

  In the 1920s plotlanders started arriving at Camber dragging railway waggons, old buses and trams, caravans and shacks on trailers. They were searching for a different way of life, away from the smoke and noise of the city and the proximity of neighbours and strangers. They were ordinary people – shopkeepers, traders, small-time entrepreneurs, struggling artists – who simply wanted a place on the fringe to be free and left in peace. They paid £25 for a hundred feet of sand facing the sea, which was enough. There were no planning regulations then, no council planning departments. You could go where you wanted and, within reason, live as you liked.

  The plotland movement took off in various parts of the country, inland and by the sea. The story of its short-lived flowering was told by Dennis Hardy and one of the founding fathers of the gentle, pastoral, English style of anarchism, Colin Ward, in their book Arcadia For All. They saw the plotlanders as innocent and unconscious anarchists, claiming a place on land that was unwanted and useless for agriculture and creating, through hard work and inventiveness, strong, organic communities held together by bonds of friendship and interdependence.

  In 1947 the Town and Country Planning Act became law. It was the first systematic step towards imposing state control on what could be built where, and it killed off the plotland movement, as it was intended to do. But, as Hardy and Ward pointed out, the spirit behind it is immortal and continues to find occasional expression even in these regulation-stuffed, form-filled days. At Jury’s Gap, a settlement just east of Camber, several of the bungalows along the road retain something of the plotland ethos. One, in pale-blue clapperboard and shaped like three sheds nailed together, had a verandah, in front of which an old chap was energetically strimming the grass. He told me he had moved there for one reason: it was cheap. ‘Do you like my sea view?’ he asked with a laugh, pointing at the sea defence between him and the Channel.

  I hoisted my bike onto it and set off towards Camber. Yellow waves broke onto the distant sea edge. Beyond, kitesurfers were slicing through the breakers at incredible speed, sails taut against the gusting breeze. Every now and then one would take off altogether, turning and twisting in the air, then float down to the surface again.

  Kitesurfing is banned at Camber Sands itself because of the danger of the wires slicing somebody’s head off. At the café on the beach I had a bacon sandwich and a mug of tea. The bloke running it said he’d come to Camber for the fishing. He’d always planned to end up by the sea; on quiet days like this he spent a lot of time staring out from the windows, thinking of cod and bass. The scene always changes, he said, but it’s always the same as well. ‘You can never get tired of looking at the sea. Winter’s best, and spring and autumn. Summer’s for business.’

  Steep dunes of yellow sand held together by marram grass and chestnut paling rear up between the beach and the road. I asked my friend in the café if any of the original railway carriages were still around. He pointed at the dunes. ‘There’s at least one buried in there,’ he said.

  A little further west, skirting Winchelsea Beach, I bumped into an old fairground man walking his dog. He and his family had once run the amusement park opposite the entrance to the caravan park. ‘It did well in the seventies,’ he reminisced. ‘Then it went downhill, then it went through the floor.’ It was the electronic age that did for it. Kids used to come to the park to play video games, then they got them on their home computers. ‘Now it’s all iPads.’ He shook his head. ‘Still, mustn’t grumble. It’s still a great place to live. You can’t beat the sea air.’

  4

  CONCRETE KING

  Warrior Square, Hastings

  Considering its reputation as a premier seaside sinkhole, Hastings is a pleasant surprise. Its old town is quaint and full of charm. Its imposing seafront, in spite of various eyesores and aberrations, retains much of its stuccoed elegance, enough to recall the confidence and pride of its Victorian builders.

  It has the swish and striking black-clad Jerwood Gallery, the distinctive black weatherboarded Net Shops, and a fishing fleet that, although drastically reduced from what it once was, still fishes and gives the town the flavour of having a working port. It has a splendidly shabby Gothic library, a treasure store of information about Hastings’ long history. It has the Marine Court apartment block, which was built to look like a Cunard liner berthed on land, magnificently self-assured in its day although now getting somewhat scruffy. It even has a silver statue of a giant whelk.

  Inevitably Hastings has its disfigurements. In the 1990s it gave up its fine old cricket ground in exchange for a dull shopping centre like every other dull shopping centre. Its pier – now being restored – has long been a wrecked, scorched, skeletal symbol of neglect. The arcade of shops below and to the front of the glorious Pelham Crescent has been permitted to sink into a scandalous state of decay and tackiness, as has the extravagant pile, part renaissance palace, part French château, that is the former Palace Hotel, now Palace Court.

  Pelham Crescent, Hastings

  Successive generations of planners and their masters have much to answer for in Hastings as in other seaside towns. But sometimes you have to feel for them. In the case of Hastings the most intractable challenge in terms of crumbling infrastructure facing the local authority is the legacy of the man who did more than any other to restore – for a brief, golden period – the status that the town had enjoyed in the nineteenth century.

  When Sidney Little was interviewed for the post of Hastings Borough Engineer in 1926, he told his prospective employers that he had walked around the town and found it shabby and decayed. What Hastings needed, he declared, was ‘to be dragged into the twentieth century’. They took a leap of faith with Little, gave him the funds he needed and he repaid them amply.

  He began by upgrading the sea defences and building a new pavilion for the bowling green. He had the tramways along the seafront ripped up and installed Britain’s first underground car park. He completely rebuilt the seafront promenade on two levels. The covered lower walkway incorporated semicircular bastions with sliding glass windows to keep off the rain and the spray and a 500-seat heated sun lounge with a floor patterned in Jarrah. Set into the back wall were millions of fragments of smashed bottles of coloured glass that winked and glittered kaleidoscopically when the sun was reflected off the sea.

  The cost of the seafront project was £150,000, perhaps £8 million today. At the same time Little was busy working his way
through a further £100,000 on refurbishing and enlarging the White Rock Swimming Baths, originally built as Turkish baths in the 1870s. This reopened in June 1931, complete with a blue-and-yellow bathers’ deck, a two-tier viewing gallery for 400 people enclosed by a bronze ballustrade, and an entrance lit by two giant semi-circular copper-glazed windows. The main pool, tiled in white and green, was 165 feet long and 37 feet wide. A passage led to smaller chambers containing a foam pool and a saltwater pool with seaweed.

  Little then turned his attention to the swimmers of St Leonard’s, the well-bred western extension of Hastings. The St Leonard’s outdoor pool was conceived and constructed on a heroic scale: 100 yards long, 30 wide, with a 10-metre high-diving board, terraces to seat 200 and space around for 2000 to sunbathe. In 1936 two more underground car parks were opened by the Transport Minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, who told his audience that they ‘celebrated the enterprise that has put Hastings in the forefront of all seaside towns.’

  In retrospect it’s easy to see that Sidney Little’s ambitions for Hastings were out of proportion to its needs. During the war he was seconded to the MOD and helped develop the concrete Mulberry harbours used for the D-Day landings. In 1946 he returned to the south coast to take up the reins again. But everything had changed or was changing. Little drew up a plan to raze much of the town centre and replace it with a new one built – like his promenade – on two levels. It was rejected, as was a proposal to extend the promenade east and clear out the fishing port in favour of an amusement park.